No one, no-one, nobody, no noone

The indefinite pronouns no one and nobody are largely interchangeable. Garner (1998) notes that no one is more formal and literary, a judgement supported by this corpus analysis. Both terms, however, are apt to appear without controversy in almost any kind of writing.

No one, meaning no person, is spelt with two words. The hyphenated no-one is a common variant, especially in informal contexts, though it is less to my taste than the traditional two-worded form. The diaeretic noöne is unlikely to enter common usage. The practice of writing no one as noone may have resulted from its virtual synonymity with the one-worded nobody; from its connection to the similarly unified everyone, anyone and someone; or from the tendency for the morphology of many compound words to go from A B to A-B to AB.

Noone is a decidedly strange spelling of no one. To my eyes, today, it is wrong, but no one can say for sure what usage will be accepted in 50 years’ time. Noone implies the monosyllabic pronunciation /nuːn/, especially to non-native speakers of English. (Mind you, I have yet to hear anyone mispronounce cooperate.) Searches for “noone” on Bartleby.com turned up a small number of results, all of them the archaic spelling of noon.

Moreover, noone immediately suggests some specific person called Noone, e.g. the actor Nora-Jane Noone or the musician Peter Noone. Thus it may lead to momentary ambiguity or to additional meanings that are both unintended and comic:

Noone loves me, but I have my eye on Sullivan.
Noone saw Noone leave the room.
Noone was behind the tree, so I discreetly relieved myself before rejoining the others.

You see the problem.

Now, a few notes on usage.

Indefinite pronouns (no one, everyone, anybody, etc.) usually take singular verbs but can be referred to by singular or plural pronouns (they, them, their). If you follow an indefinite pronoun with a plural pronoun, you scupper notional agreement (AKA “concord”), but you avoid awkward constructions such as s/he and his or her, as well as the accusations of sexism habitually slung at the notoriously gender-specific he, his and him.

Sometimes the singular form will be called for, and it is preferred by some writers, but there is nothing grammatically wrong with the plural.

“Nobody remembers a journalist for their writing” – Richard F Shepard
“[N]o one can ever be in love more than once in their life” – Jane Austen, in Sense and Sensibility
“Nobody here seems to look into an Author, ancient or modern, if they can avoid it” – Lord Byron, in a letter

This last quote is cited in The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, which adds that Byron’s “Nobody here” could only have meant males. Yet he opted for genderless they, and it seems altogether natural and sensible. Elsewhere, MWDEU states that “the plural they, their, them with an indefinite pronoun as referent is in common standard use”. Writing about any, anyone and anybody, Robert Burchfield points out that “popular usage and historical precedent favour the use of a plural pronoun”. In adopting the singular use of “plural” they, Byron is in good company.

So, would you write “No one in their right mind”, “No one in his right mind”, “No one in her right mind”, “No one in his or her right mind”, “No one in zer right mind”, or what? My advice is to approach these options with an open mind; to be aware of, but not cowed by, those who decry singular-they constructions; and to let context, meaning and good sense guide your decision.

[image source]

The power of understatement compels you!

Old newspapers and magazines provide great material for collages, but before I begin snipping I read any articles that appeal to me. Lately I was leafing through an Observer magazine from March when I saw an interview with the actor Michelle Williams, whom I like. (She adorned the cover too, so the article was not a complete surprise.)

So I began reading, and before long I encountered some strange adverbial usage. The first example appears in the second line:

She is unassumingly small, pretty rather than stunning…

If we ignore the shallowness of these observations and agree that unassuming means not assuming, modest, without pretensions, what does “unassumingly small” mean? That is to say, how does unassuming qualify small? It seems an ungainly and illogical combination. “Unassuming and small” would have made sense. Why adverbialise unassuming? If it is because small can seem blunt without a flattering modifier, I suggest “unassuming and petite”. Or am I missing something?

A few lines later, at the end of the first paragraph, there is a comparable example:

Yet she has received a great deal of attention […] and very little of it for her compellingly understated screen work.

Now, I could almost be persuaded to allow “unassumingly small” – though as an editor I would question it and suggest alternatives – but I would require thorough brainwashing to be persuaded by “compellingly understated”.

Williams’s screen work may be compelling, and it may also be understated, but to describe as compelling the degree to which it is understated is an involution too far for me. I would bet that not even film reviewers are compelled by the understatement of an actor’s performance. At least, not habitually.

It’s also possible that I am being excessively fussy about this. I would welcome the case for the defence. In the meantime, I have to wonder why these phrases were written. Was it out of stubborn aversion to certain uses of the word “and”? Adherence to some other obscure non-rule? I’m stumped.

Up from out of in under for

The English language often combines verbs with prepositions to form phrasal verbs, and its subject-predicate structure means that many sentences end naturally in prepositions. Yet students, children, writers, and anyone likely to use the language are sometimes instructed not to end sentences with prepositions.

This is bad advice that has been passed on mindlessly for centuries, and seems to have led to embarrassing levels of contemporary silliness. It is an example of what Joseph M. Williams called “classroom folklore”, and good writers generally have the good sense to ignore it. This spurious pseudo-rule – a “cherished superstition” in H. W. Fowler’s words – seems to have originated with John Dryden, and has echoed through the dustier halls of grammar guidance ever since.

If anyone tells you that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition, you can safely assume they don’t know what they are talking about. Make good your escape while they insist that they do know “about what they talk” – unless you’re heavily outnumbered, in which case things could get ugly:

[Comic by the Perry Bible Fellowship.]

If there is gladness in the madness, it lies in the many witty and imaginative retorts and plays on natural English syntax. There are amusingly overworked sentences that end in long processions of stacked prepositions:

What did you bring that book that I didn’t want to be read to out of up for? (parsed here)

and even more tortuously elaborate variants:

What did you bring that book that I didn’t want to be read aloud to out of from up for?
What did you bring that book that I didn’t want to be read to out of about Down Under up for?

There are charming lines like the following one from James Thurber’s Alarms and Diversions:

‘It’s a bad city to get something in your eye in,’ the nurse said. ‘Yes,’ the interne agreed, ‘but there isn’t a better place to get something in your eye out in.’

and a more familiar one, often falsely attributed to Winston Churchill:

This is the sort of arrant nonsense up with which I will not put.

Finally there is Morris Bishop’s witty poem ‘The Naughty Preposition’, which was published in The New Yorker on 27 September 1947:

I lately lost a preposition;
It hid, I thought, beneath my chair
And angrily I cried, ‘Perdition!
Up from out of in under there.’

Correctness is my vade mecum,
And straggling phrases I abhor,
And yet I wondered, ‘What should he come
Up from out of in under for?’

Bishop was Professor of Romance Literature at Cornell University, where he was also University Historian. He had a reputation for wit and scholarship, and a flair for limericks and mystique. He seems to have been prejudiced against elves, but who can blame him? At least he was not prejudiced against stranded prepositions.

For more on ending sentences with prepositions, I recommend MWDEU’s historical analysis, sane commentary, and sound advice.

Link love: language (5)

Arnold Zwicky on the re-nouning of fail.

The role of Google Books in saving texts from oblivion.

And they say it is a capital offence.

Ben Crystal discusses Shakespeare’s accent (mp3, 7 min.).

The language of birds.

Well, um, y’know, it’s, uh, I mean like…

Julian Jaynes: Consciousness and the voices of the mind (PDF, 286 KB).

Pedantry as “an insistence on reasonable accuracy”.

Stephen Fry bubbling and frothing with joy at language (mp3, 33 min.).

[Previously on Link love.]

Back-forming back-formations

Back-formation (or back formation or backformation) is a term that describes the way certain words are formed. It also refers to the words themselves, so back-formations result from back-formation. If affixation means forming a word by adding an affix (e.g. frosty from frost, refusal from refuse, instrumentation from instrument), then back-formation is essentially this process in reverse: it adapts an existing word by removing its affix, usually a suffix (e.g. sulk from sulky, proliferate from proliferation, back-form from back-formation).

Sometimes a back-formation arises through the assumption that it must already exist, and that its source word is the derivative term. Such an assumption, while misguided, is altogether reasonable, being based on a summary analysis of the source word’s morphology.  Consider donation. You might think it derives from donate, but the noun is several centuries older; donate is the back-formation. You are unlikely to recognise a back-formation just by looking at it.

Another everyday example is burgle, a back-formation from burglary. In U.S. English, burglarize (or -ise) is by far the more common verb, but burgle dominates in British English. That burgle has failed to take hold in U.S. English may be partly a result of its lowly origins as a back-formation, as well as its funny phonetic blend of burble and gurgle. But whatever the reasons, I wouldn’t call it “hideous”. Back-formations are not inherently wrong, but they can be redundant; before you use one that seems new or gimmicky, check if there is a standard alternative. [Image: burgling tools. Or are they burglarizing tools?]

Back-formations are frequently made by dropping -tion or -ion from a noun, and adding -e when appropriate, to form a new verb, such as donate from donation. From evolution we get evolute, which has technical meanings as a noun in mathematics and as an adjective in botany, but as a verb meaning the same as evolve, it is a needless variant. Similarly superfluous are cohabitate for cohabit, interpretate for interpret, and solicitate for solicit. Solicitate has a standard adjectival use; it is only its unnecessary use as a verb that I advise against. Last week I heard someone on the radio say installating, as if he had forgotten all about install. But some of these may eventually become standard, even installate.

In most of the examples I’ve included so far, the change has occurred at the end of the word, i.e. the removed affix has been a suffix. Back-forming by removing prefixes is less common, except in humorous contexts such as Jack Winter’s “How I met my wife”, which boasts a litany of deliberately malformed terms like chalant, ept, and peccable.

Regardless of how back-formations are formed, they are often initially considered to be irregular, even ignorant, and suitable only for informal use in slang or jokes. Sometimes, as we have seen, there is no need for them because the semantic niche they purport to inhabit has already been filled. Other back-formations, such as enthuse and liaise, inhabit a grey area of acceptability. And then there are many that serve a useful purpose and have become standard. Here are some I haven’t mentioned already:

automate from automation
beg from beggar
diagnose from diagnosis
drowse from drowsy
edit from editor
execute from execution
free associate from free association
grovel from grovelling (or -l-) (adj.)
injure from injury
intuit from intuition
kidnap from kidnapper
orate from oration
pea from pease
peddle from peddler
reminisce from reminiscence
resurrect from resurrection
scavenge from scavenger
self-destruct from self-destruction (from destroy, destruction)
sleaze from sleazy
statistic from statistics
surveil from surveillance
televise from television
vaccinate from vaccination
window-shop (v.) from window-shopping

Not only . . . but (also) . . .

Despite the apparent simplicity of these correlative conjunctions, there is uncertainty and disagreement over the suitability of their use and the correctness of their placement. Much of this discord pertains to the need for parallelism and sentence balance. I will look at that later in the post, but first I will give an overview of how the conjunctions are used. Not only is this post quite long and detailed, it also lacks images, so I have folded it up and divided it into three general sections (Usage, Parallelism, Opinions).

Usage

Writers typically, but not always, use both parts of the set, i.e. (1) not only, and (2) but (also). The first part is occasionally written not just or not alone, while the second part is commonly seen in the forms but . . . too and but . . . as well. These variants offer different nuances but not very different meanings.

It was not just a big bear, but a grumpy one as well.
Not alone did she win the race, but she also beat the record.
He not only used a fictitious example, but he reproduced it too.

But (also) is the most common root form, so I will focus on it in this discussion. Where the alternatives are not mentioned, consider them implied. When but is included you can either add also (or its alternatives) or not; both forms are common and standard. Hence the parentheses in but (also), which could also be written as (but) also, since but sometimes does not appear either.

He not only used a fictitious example, but he also reproduced it.
He not only used a fictitious example, he also reproduced it.
Rowers not only face backward, they race backward.

The last example, from the New Yorker, is effective because of its succinctness and punchy rhythm. Adding but would impair it, while adding also would do little or nothing to improve it. Doing without but or also tends to reduce formality, or to reduce stiffness in formal prose, and can benefit short and straightforward constructions. Here are a few more:

“Borges not only wrote stories but transformed them” (The Mirror Man documentary)
“The shape of Cleopatra’s nose influences not only wars, but ideologies” (Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers)
“The omission of the also is not only frequent but Standard” (Kenneth G. Wilson, Columbia Guide to Standard American English)

Apostrophes in business names and place names

Apostrophes are commonly misused. This attracts pedantic sarcasm, which is unhelpful, and pedantic invective, which is unpleasant. Sentence first will supply neither, but a forthcoming post will take a closer look at punctuation mockery. Nor will I write in detail about how to use apostrophes correctly (not today, anyway); countless books and websites provide this information, yet confusion continues unabated. Before you read further, you might want to read my earlier post on the subject. It’s shorter than this one.

Surveying the scene we see widespread addition, omission, and misplacement: contemporary apostrophe usage is wayward and inconsistent. Ian Mayes, former readers editor at The Guardian, blames a mysterious creature called the apostrofly, which the newspaper’s style guide describes as “an insect that lands at random on the printed page, depositing an apostrophe wherever it lands”. Like this:

[cartoon by What the Duck]

It can be difficult to predict whether a place name requires an apostrophe – and, if it does, where to put it. The mark’s placement in Queen’s College, Belfast does not correlate with that in Queens’ College, Cambridge, because the latter college was named after two queens. If you didn’t know this, you are unlikely to guess. If your name is Harker and you adopt it eponymously for your business, is it Harkers, Harker’s, or Harkers’? Well, that depends. Harkers’ is wrong unless your name is Harkers or you want to indicate a family business, and in these cases you can expect regular mistakes. Standard English traditionally requires the mark before a possessive s, thus Harker’s, and this is the form I recommend, but the same caveat applies.

There is a trend towards removing apostrophes from business names and place names. This trend may be unstoppable, though it is of course censured by the Apostrophe Protection Society, among others. Confusion and brand simplification are among the reasons for the mark’s gradual disappearance from these domains. A spokesperson for Barclays Bank said of the missing apostrophe: “It has just disappeared over the years. Barclays is no longer associated with the family name.” Current usage is thoroughly mixed. We have Currys but Sainsbury’s; Dunnes Stores but Supermac’s; Fyffes Bananas but Barry’s Tea; Ballinteer St Johns but St John’s Wood (though not always); Land’s End and Martha’s Vineyard but Toms River and Earls Court. An added complication is that in some cases (e.g. Earls in Earls Court) the -s noun may be a plural noun used attributively, i.e. acting as an adjective and therefore in no need of an apostrophe.

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names advises against possessive apostrophes (#1 and #18 here), and there are persuasive arguments for standardisation. Lorraine Woodward has done interesting research into apostrophe use in supermarket names, and into a related phenomenon that she calls the “s-form”, where a superfluous s is added to a supermarket name (e.g. Tesco’s). Traditionalists might decry this kind of non-standard usage, and cite the sanctity of grammar, but the English language did fine before incorporating the apostrophe, and some of its finest practitioners throughout history used apostrophes in ways that would be pilloried today.

I took these photos within a few minutes’ walk of one another (click for large size). Each demonstrates mixed use. While I don’t condone faulty and contradictory punctuation, I have no wish to ridicule or criticise these businesses and their signs. What constitutes apostrophe misuse is less clear-cut than you might suppose after visiting name-and-shame-type websites. Bryan Garner, the lawyer and lexicographer who wrote the excellent A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, believes that increased literacy is the only cure for apostrophe misuse. Robert Burchfield, who edited the third edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage and was not exactly an anarchic descriptivist, offered a contrary opinion in The English Language (1985):

The prevalence of incorrect instances of the use of the apostrophe at the present time, even in the work of otherwise reasonably well-educated people (e.g. it’s wings, apple’s for sale, this is your’s), together with the abandonment of it by many business firms (Barclays Bank, Lloyds Bank) suggest that the time is close at hand when this moderately useful device should be abandoned.

Although I am not calling for this to happen, I accept that confused apostrophe usage will be with us for a while yet. I will continue to write and edit text according to prevailing standards, but should the apostrophe be abandoned in my lifetime, there will be no emotional outbursts. Languages change all the time, and this change does not derive from grammar books or academic institutions so much as from everyone who uses the language. For better or worse, deliberately or not, some businesses have adopted what seems to me a very Irish solution to the problem.